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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

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Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#171

Post by rday »

brandonmenc wrote: post #74
jurassic wrote: post #29

No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

> It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. If you dig around the author's Google+ account, his wife appears not to work. I'm not casting stones re: single worker households - particularly if they're living within their means - but an American household wanting to do more than just scrape by r…

My wife is a teacher. I have no idea how this guy has two jobs with 100 students. When does he grade papers? When does he read reports? When does he plan his classes with other teachers?

From what I've seen, the summer off is a bit of compensation for the 12 hour work day during the school year.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#172

Post by pdabbadabba »

jpadkins wrote: post #112
jurassic wrote: post #29

No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

education degrees are lower on the IQ scale http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle... I think they are paid about right, given the business model. If we had a private run education system, we would see much higher salaries (and attract much smarter people to the career).

> education degrees are lower on the IQ scale

What makes you think this is a cause, rather than an effect of low pay? (Assuming, dubiously, these statistics aren't total nonsense, and we should actually care about average IQ.)

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#173

Post by cafard »

willvarfar wrote: post #22
w1ntermute wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

All the uninterested parents would become really interested around selection time trying to get their kids into the 'best' schools. As soon as the choice is made, however, they'd be back to indifference. School is viewed as delegating responsibility from parent to teacher. In England there have been so-silly-its-staggering stories of anti-terror legislation being used to spy on parents suspected of lying about their…

Some New Jersey school districts put effort into tracking down kids from out of the district, and some New Jersey parents put effort into getting their kid into a district where they don't reside. And I have known people in the District of Columbia to put work into out-of-bounds registration for particular schools.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#175

Post by AndrewKemendo »

My wife is a school teacher and so I see this from her constantly. She argues that people don't value her work but that it is vitally important.

So my question to her is, if it is so valuable then why aren't people willing to pay for it? The answer seems to be, because they can't afford it. People with money spend egregious amounts of money on schooling and private school teachers are reasonably well paid.

Publicly funded schools however are like every other major bureaucratic organization, they have to prove their worth and are all competing for a shrinking pot of money. That is where all these bullshit requirements come from.

Schools are trying to prove that their teaching is effective. The problem with this however is that the community around the school, the engagement of parents in education and the economic opportunity in the community has as much if not a larger influence on educational outcomes than the actual school day activities do.

In my opinion schools should be kind of a seat of knowledge for their communities, not just a place that kids go to during the day and then go back home - like a glorified day care (or prison).

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#176

Post by tokenadult »

waynemr wrote: post #9

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for

I challenge you directly to find any example of a conservative person saying that they want good teachers to leave public service. Most voters and taxpayers who have considered the issue want bad teachers to leave the public payroll, to make more room for good teachers. Young people from poor families need to be taught well to help children from poor families advance in developed countries,[1] and several researchers on education suggest that simply encouraging the very worst teachers to change careers might have a huge benefit for school effectiveness for whole countries.[2]

[1] http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

[2] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/economic-value-hig...

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#177

Post by learnstats2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #146
WalterBright wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can master a subject yet be unable to answer written questions about it. In my anecdotal 16 years of schooling, I can't recall a single instance of it.

For one, no one is mastering any subjects because they're taught to pass tests, not to understand. Teaching (and learning) to pass tests is less work for everyone, so schools tend to gravitate towards this. Also, I've seen tests so dumb that the better you understand a subject, the worse your chances are - because questions and answer templates are stupid/made by people who didn't master the subject, and if you under…

"Well, in truth the answer is X, but you should probably write Y, because the lecturer has a fundamental misconception of the subject that is evident from his lecture notes and exam papers dating back 10 years"

This gets impressively more common at undergraduate level.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#178

Post by afarrell »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #175

My wife is a school teacher and so I see this from her constantly. She argues that people don't value her work but that it is vitally important. So my question to her is, if it is so valuable then why aren't people willing to pay for it? The answer seems to be, because they can't afford it. People with money spend egregious amounts of money on schooling and private school teachers are reasonably well paid. Publicly f…

At my university, We had a program called SPLASH! that let us teach classes on anything we wanted to about 2000 local high school students. Now, I'm not under the impression that my 1hr class did anything but make students see that they could use the command line; real learning takes time and continuous investment. But it did show all these high schoolers that there were a bunch of people seriously excited about learning.

Why can't a high school host something similar? Possibly liability.

One effect of broader community engagement might be that folks are more likely to vote for tax increases to fund schools.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#179

Post by delinka »

SeanLuke wrote: post #174

In what way is this person the "Virginia Teacher of the Year"? The word "Virginia" never appears in the body. He was the Waynesboro (pop. 20K) Rotary Club Teacher of the Year.

He's a "Teacher of the Year" from Virginia. Similar to how "Florida man" is from Florida.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#180

Post by twoodfin »

Donzo wrote: post #151
w1ntermute wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

We do this in Chicago. We call them "magnet" schools, as they are intended to attract the best and the brightest. On the one hand, these are the most diverse schools in this heavily segregated city. They give students from rough neighborhoods a better chance to live a different life. On the other hand, they decrease the quality of neighborhood schools (non-magnet) by skimming the cream from the top, if you will. Now,…

Maybe this is far too naive, but wouldn't a smart but unmotivated kid respond to the same incentives as anyone else? Namely, can we figure out how to reward kids and their families monetarily for staying in school and excelling? The promise of some scholarship years down the line might not do it.

Obviously this is tricky business for a host of reasons, but if we expect education to be a worthwhile investment, there's got to be some way to 'borrow' against those expected future gains.

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